Chipping away at the little things holding us back in our virtualization journey…

And here we are at the end of February already! Time and tech continue to

keep moving. If the weather outside is too cold for you to get outside – there is plenty of VMware news in this newsletter to keep you busy – treadmill or not!

Upcoming Events

Toledo Q1 VMUG (March 7th, 2018) – This is for those of you in the Northwest part of Ohio. The Toledo VMUG is meeting again! This event is Wednesday, March 7th from 11:30am-1:30pm. Lunch will be provided. VMware Staff Engineer Tom Zukowski will be presenting on NSX. Get more information and register here.

Central Ohio VMUG UserCON (April 3, 2018) – Save the date, and plan to be at the Convention Center in Columbus on April 4 for one of the largest VMUG events in the mid-west! View the Agenda and register.

VMworld 2018

VMworld 2018 call for papers is out! Have you integrated VMware solutions and technologies in an innovative way? Do you have a best practice or individual technical tips and tricks to recommend? Can you tell us about an amazing app that leverages VMware solutions to improve your business? We want to hear about it.

NSX – Want to know the various NSX components talk to each other? Check out this nifty NSX Communications Diagram. You can also download a Logical Views Cheat Sheet. Did you know that NSX can run in multiple clouds and on multiple Hypervisors? Learn about NSX-T. NSX 6.4 comes with the upgrade coordinator. In the past you may have had to log into the various components to upgrade. Learn how the Upgrade Coordinator makes this process easier.

If you haven’t tried vSphere Update Manager to upgrade/patch your hosts – give it a try! You’ll never boot servers from CDs again! Once you do update your hosts, you should update the VMware Tools in your guests. While you are certainly welcome to right-click each VM, there are a few ways to automate the update. You can even use SCCM to do it. If you aren’t really certain what VMware Tools do – check out this primer.

Horizon – If you use AppVolumes, would it be useful to know which apps are actually used. VMware has developed a PowerShell script to query the AppVolumes database and pull some metrics out that may be useful. It sounds like this was developed for cloud providers; but it may still be useful – and possibly extendable…

If you use NVIDIA GPU cards for graphics intensive desktops or GPU-enabled applications, you will soon be able to utilize vMotion in these scenarios.

Ever want to hear how other organizations deploy and use Horizon? At VMworld 2017, VMware’s Simon Long discusses the internal Horizon deployment project at VMW. Go behind the scenes and learn some of the secret sauce. Another topic that I get frequently is how others are handling Windows 10 upgrades in VDI.

Many customers explore building their own HCI system. There is quite a lot of discussion on this topic. Make sure you consider the full system life-cycle before deciding to build your own. It may not save as much as you think…